Ta-Nehisi Coates : The Atlantic

The Alchemy of Obama

2012-02-13T15:00:00-05:00

In this month's cover story, James Fallows takes a moment to zero in on 2010, and the Obama Administration's soft hand with the banks

An official familiar with the administration's economic policy told me: "The recapitalization of the banks was a good idea, and necessary. But we did not put enough conditions on [their] getting the money. Ultimately not being tougher with the guys that got the money is the thing that overthrows the government twice--in 2008 [in a reaction against Bush's TARP plan] and again in 2010." Keeping the system going was the guideline during the early days of financial rescue, and again later during the argument over government shutdowns and the raising of the debt ceiling. During the initial rescue,

Obama's response was of course shaped by the technocrat circle that guided the effort. From their experience with Asian and Latin American financial panics during the Clinton era, the likes of Summers, Geithner, and Orszag understood that their task was akin to emergency-room medicine, or firefighting. They had to contain the emergency first, because otherwise there was no telling how dire the consequences could be, and worry about anything else later.

"Larry, Tim, Peter--when they heard about restricting bonuses or compensation, they would think, These are people's contracts, we can't change their contracts," a member of the executive branch said. "But really it was the idea that the problem was enormous, the economy is in big trouble, do we want to make enemies while we're putting out the fire? Usually they opted for whatever they thought would keep the economy going."

This rings true about the mood in the middle of an emergency, and also about the cultural tone-deafness that can affect people who all come from the same rarefied world.

I think this is really the sort of thing that burns up the president's more populist critics. In our guts, a lot of us wanted to see the sort of justice meted out which we are all subject to in our daily lives. And yet meting out that justice may well have made matters worse. Part of the advantage of power isn't just in wielding but in being able to escape the full brunt of punishment for wielding it irresponsibly.

As an aside, I enjoyed Fallows piece. Along with some of the better journalism we've seen over the past few months, it really makes clear that the inexperience criticism we heard during the Clinton campaign was substantive. And yet, given that Clinton folks are behind some of the administration's greatest shortcomings, I'm still not sure what to make of that point.

I think the thing is this: Nobody wins them all. And presidential greatness, in the moment, requires a uncanny combination of powers. Fallows again:

Presidents fail because not to fail would require, in the age of modern communications and global responsibilities, a range of native talents and learned skills no real person has ever possessed. These include "smarts" in the normal sense--the analytical ability to cope with the stream of short- and long-term decisions that come at a president nonstop. (How serious is the latest provocation out of North Korea? What are the "out year" budget implications of a change in Medicaid repayment formulas?)

A president needs rhetorical clarity and eloquence, so that he can explain to publics at home and around the world the intent behind his actions and--at least as important--so that everyone inside the administration understands his priorities clearly enough that he does not have to wade into every little policy fight to enforce his preferences. A president needs empathy and emotional intelligence, so that he can prevail in political dealings with his own party and the opposition in Washington, and in face-to-face negotiations with foreign leaders, who otherwise will go away saying that this president is "weak" and that the country's leadership role is suspect.

He needs to be confident but not arrogant; open-minded but not a weather vane; resolute but still adaptable; historically minded but highly alert to the present; visionary but practical; personally disciplined but not a prig or martinet. He should be physically fit, disease-resistant, and capable of being fully alert at a moment's notice when the phone rings at 3 a.m.--yet also able to sleep each night, despite unremitting tension and without chemical aids...

A new president's first term is usually an experiment in seeing which weak point will limit everything else he does. George W. Bush was disciplined and decisive but not sufficiently informed or inquisitive. Bill Clinton was informed and inquisitive but was nearly driven from office because he was not personally disciplined. George H. W. Bush was disciplined and informed but could not seem empathetic or visionary. Ronald Reagan was eloquent and decisive but less and less attentive to the analytic part of his job. You can take the list back a very long way. Many presidents who survive to a second term and thereby attain the ultimate in political success see their preexisting failings bear worse fruit. Impeachment for Bill Clinton, Iran-Contra for Ronald Reagan, impeachment and resignation for Richard Nixon, and so on.

The alchemy of it all is dizzying. My sense is that Obama possesses more of these qualities than he lacks. Moreover, I think having to carry all of this off all while being the biggest black "First" in American history is impressive. Like Fallows, I would expect him to grow in his second term.

The Unspectacular Spider-Man

2012-02-13T13:00:00-05:00

Spider-Man was (and remains) my single favorite comic-book hero, and yet I can't seem to get excited about the reboot. I recently watched the trailer and got some sense for why--it really just feels old. Maybe it's because Spider-Man is the original patron-saint of nerds, but there's something limiting about the sense that he can't actually grow up.

I was thinking, this weekend, about arcs I'd like to see in the movie, but most of them go away from the core of what most people consider Spider-Man to really be about. There are a lot of reasons for why you wouldn't want to do, say, Kraven's Last Hunt, but among them is the fact that the story seems far removed from what most folks consider the essence of Spider-Man--goofy teenage years, great power/great responsibility, etc.

It also could simply be that I'm over-exposed to Spider-Man. I didn't read much Batman, but his various iterations, from Tim Burton to Christopher Nolan actually felt different. I'd throw Bruce Timm in there. I'd also add that X-Men: First Class also felt different--even from the trailers. Perhaps it's the ability to throw in new characters. I don't know. I just feel really "meh" about it.

Sometimes You Should Say Nothing

2012-02-13T13:00:00-05:00

Some lucky lady in NYC is gonna feel a couple inches of pain tonight.
-- Jason Whitlock (@WhitlockJason) February 11, 2012

That's Whitlock on Jeremy Lin. I understand that it's hard to button it when you write for food, as I do. Perhaps it's impossible when, in your professional life, you write things like this:

"She'd rather eat, half-ass her way through non-major tournaments and complain she's not getting the respect her 11-major-championships résumé demands...[S]eriously, how else can Serena [Williams] fill out her size 16 shorts without grazing at her stall between matches?"

"And you probably think I don't like Serena. You're wrong. I love her. She's the main reason I watch tennis. She's fascinating. Her power and skill are breathtaking. And when she's in shape, she's every bit as sexy as Beyonce."

There is a theory that "anyone" who talks for a living will eventually say something homophobic/racist/sexist. I think it's much more likely that if you talk for a living you will slowly reveal yourself. Roland Martin's tweet did not come out of thin air. Even in the age of spin, I think what people say has meaning.

Whitlock has predictably apologized.

The Lost Battalion

2012-02-13T12:00:00-05:00

It's yours...

'Black People Deserve Better Than This'

2012-02-13T11:00:00-05:00

Famous first L. Douglas Wilder was supposed to be putting together a powerhouse slavery museum in Virginia. It looks like no such museum is in the offing:

"Governor Wilder disappeared," said Rev. Lawrence Davies, the former longtime mayor of Fredericksburg who was a member of the board. Davies stopped getting notices about board meetings, and when he tried to reach Wilder, he never heard back.

"No one could ever get through to him,'' Davies said. "We didn't know what to think." It wasn't just board members and city officials who were left to wonder. There are donors, too, asking what happened.

"I trusted them," said Therbia Parker Sr., a general contractor from Suffolk, Va., who gave the museum nearly 100 artifacts he had collected over 40 years, including rare and invaluable pieces such as leg shackles, a handwritten bill of sale for slaves, and a collar with a plantation name and slave number on it.

"I'll never forget the first time I saw a newspaper with ads for runaway slaves," he said. "The reality of it: This really happened."

He wanted future generations to feel that history as he had. But he doesn't know where the artifacts he donated are now. And he is furious that the museum, slated to open in 2004, was never built.

"Black people deserve better than this," he said.

Indeed. Parker has yet to get any of those artifacts back. He doesn't even know where they are. The callousness here is breathtaking.

Mitt Romney's Shifty Social Conservatism

2012-02-13T10:00:00-05:00

The Times traces the former Massachusetts governor's foot-steps from pro-choice to pro-life:

In 2002, as a candidate for governor, Mr. Romney filled out a questionnaire for Planned Parenthood declaring that he supported "the substance" of the Supreme Court's 1973 landmark abortion rights decision, Roe v. Wade. Six weeks before he was elected, he sat for an hourlong interview with state officials of the advocacy group now known as Naral Pro-Choice America. Mr. Romney promised to maintain the status quo, keeping intact the rights that already existed under state law.

At the end of the private session, when it became clear that the group was going to endorse Mr. Romney's Democratic opponent, he surprised its leaders by saying he could be a "good voice" and the most effective national Republican leader on abortion, said Melissa Kogut, a former Naral official who has detailed notes from the meeting.

"I thought, 'That's interesting. He's running for governor, and he's trying to convince us to get behind him because of the role he is going to play on the national stage,' " she said. "We left the meeting feeling pretty good."

My sense from the article is that Romney actually was pro-life, in his heart, but had no hope of winning with such a position in Massachusetts. So he lied, claimed to be pro-choice, and has now flipped back again.

That seems par for the course in presidential politics. I don't see much difference between this and the president's "evolving" position on gay marriage.

Morning Coffee

2012-02-13T09:00:00-05:00

Is there really anything else? As I've said before, in the hey-day of Whitney I was in full hardcore hip-hop revanchist mode. Anything that smacked of jheri juice, color contacts, or mass acceptance by white people was rejected on principal. Oh, to be young and stupid again. It is true that Houston's image was gilded by Clive Owens. But these are the pipes of God--and no juvenile raging against "imaging" can obviate that. You will have your favorites. Of course this is mine.

CPAC Discovers Hip-Hop

2012-02-10T20:51:37-05:00

Submitted without comment.

Obama and Purple America

2012-02-10T16:48:57-05:00

I think it's worth checking out Noam Scheiber's piece on Obama and end of his "grand compromise" trip. I don't know about other supporters, but I generally thought that when he claimed that there was no "red America" or "blue America" he was engaging in campaign rhetoric. When he claimed, as Ryan Lizza notes, that politics was mostly played between the "40 yard lines" I thought it was more packaging than principal.

When Hillary Clinton would criticize his post-partisan fantasies, I remember smugly thinking "That is exactly why I can't support you." I didn't think Obama was more "liberal" than Clinton. I thought he was less polarizing, and more likely to open up the playing field. But I also thought that, in the era of Terri Schiavo, he could really believe in post-partisanship, or a purple America.

In hindsight, I should have been less cynical and seen that Obama's 40-yard line politics were deeply tied to his ability to expand the map. Politics and policy were wedded. And so we find that it wasn't until the debt ceiling fight, that Obama truly began to comprehend his opposition:

After the midterm elections, Geithner's chief of staff, Mark Patterson, thought the administration should try to defuse the debt-limit issue once and for all before the incoming Republicans arrived. He drafted a law giving the president the authority to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally and sent it to the White House. To sell it politically, the president could explain that renewing the upper-income Bush tax cuts, as Republicans were then demanding, would cost the government $700 billion over ten years, forcing it to hit the debt ceiling sooner.

The White House was initially interested, but dropped the idea once Republicans made clear they would oppose it. But, of course, the way to win concessions from obstructionist opponents isn't to sound them out quietly. It's to cause them public discomfort. As one former Treasury aide who was involved explains: "Imagine the alternative reality where the president comes out in December and says, 'I understand you want to increase the high-end tax cuts. But that will make the deficit go up. ... I am willing to do some of what you want to do, but you have to pay for it by raising the debt ceiling.'" At the very least, it would have put the GOP on the defensive.

But the White House didn't have an appetite for going to war so soon after the midterms. Instead, it chose to bargain behind the scenes, renewing the Bush tax cuts in order to win more tax benefits for workers. "The feeling [at the White House] was, 'Let's go home, lick our wounds, sort it out.' There wasn't a lot of fight in folks," says the former Treasury aide. "We [at Treasury] were a little bit obsessed. They were, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll deal with it later...' "

Lew, Sperling, and Reed had served as top Clinton aides when the president had struck a budget deal with Republicans in 1997. The effort had led them to believe another deal was possible now. "The experience we had with the Republican Congress in the mid-nineties was that they came in and didn't want to reach agreement," says one Clinton veteran who returned under Obama. "

But, by mid-'96, they were pleading with us to agree with them on something." Unfortunately, this analogy ignored some fundamental differences between the mid-'90s and 2011. Republicans were less extreme during the Clinton years--and as of 1995, the unemployment rate was under 6 percent. In 2011, on the other hand, the Republicans were in the grips of true fiscal fanaticism while the economy was distressingly fragile. Even if it were possible to eventually strike a deal, the country couldn't afford a prolonged debate over how to apportion the pain.

I don't really fall into the category of "disappointed" when it comes to Obama's presidency. I do wish he would grant the same good will to his critics on the left that he grants to those on the right. But whatever.

If there's one thing I'm disappointed in it's that he really did think that by shrinking the stimulus, by proclaiming faith in Chuck Grassley, by proclaiming faith in John Boehner, he would actually get somewhere. And in that sense I could come in for the most common rebuttal of Obama criticism--failing to understand that he really meant what he said.

As an aside, this piece is incomplete. I'm going to dig into Fallows' cover this weekend. I'm sure I'll have more to say after that.

The Lost Battalion

2012-02-10T13:45:27-05:00

It's yours...

Chipotle And The Future Of Fast-Food

2012-02-10T11:00:00-05:00

Matt Yglesias on the wonder of bougie burritos:

In many ways, the Chipotle burrito is very similar to the iPhone. Founder Steve Ells invented a way to maintain the basic speed and experience of the standard fast-food experience and make the quality of the food a little better.* The better food costs a bit more money, but consumers turn out to be happy to pay a premium for a superior product. A similar insight is behind privately held Five Guys, a burger-oriented fast-food concept that's also grown rapidly over the past several years. At the other end of the health spectrum there's Chop't, the assembly-line salad chain that's taken New York and D.C. by storm but hasn't yet gone national. All three chains are, in their different ways, raising the bar for food quality in a quick-service setting.

Chipotle stands out for some unusual process innovations as well. Their "barbecued" meat products--carnitas and barbacoa--are vacuum-packed and cooked sous-vide in Chicago before being shipped out for on-site reheating. The sous-vide cooking method is mostly associated with cutting edge haute cuisine. The way it works is that a piece of meat and its accompanying seasonings are placed in an airtight bag. The bag is then placed in an immersion circulator, a bath of water that's held at a very precise temperature. Cooking this way is slow, but extremely precise. A piece of meat held in a 155 degree water bath for long enough will cook uniformly to exactly 155 degrees worth of doneness.

What I wonder is how a place like Chipotle is viewed out west. In New York, great tacos are hard to fine. But out in Cali? Or Texas?

Anyway, I'm just glad they haven't figured out fish tacos. That would be a problem.

The Second Lives of Pro Football Players

2012-02-10T09:00:00-05:00

Here's a really good piece by Elizabeth Merrill on NFL players staring into the abyss of retirement:

It can't be reality, pulling down a million or two a year, having surgery on both your hips by the time you're 31, hearing, around that same time, that your career is done. Washed out at 31. What does a guy do after that? "The hardest part is that you're part of something," said Chris Bober, a former offensive lineman for the Giants and Chiefs, "and then you're not and you have to go reinvent yourself."

The myth, Bober said, is that NFL players are set for life. Bober seemingly did all the right things when he was in the league. He attended Harvard Business School and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. He invested his money. Then the recession came a few years ago, around the same time he was being cut from the Chiefs, and wiped away roughly half of his investments. But even if that hadn't happened, Bober knew he had to start another career. He was in his early 30s and had spent his entire life pushing and building toward something. He had to find something else to do.

The money thing is always a shocker to people. I don't want to make any excuses. But there is something about human nature, and something about all the ways we've invented to spend money, which makes it very easy to insist on improving our standard of living. Sometimes, regrettably, way beyond our means.

But with that said, I think the psychological aspect must be a killer. I'm trying to imagine someone telling me that I basically wouldn't be able to write after age 40, or so. I don't know how to say this, but I'd feel like my life was over. The only thing in my life above my writing is family. Family, friendship and writing are about all I've been successful at. What if that were family, friendship and football?

The Great Fallon-Obama Potato Sack Race

2012-02-09T15:45:45-05:00

It probably is said too much now, but coming from a time when black people were almost exclusively subordinate on television, this sort of thing is amazing. The Obama Presidency is, if anything else, a really special reality show for black people, a love letter to all of us disgusted with watching black families through the lens of sociology and "problem-solving."

The Lost Battalion

2012-02-09T13:30:13-05:00

It's yours...

Thinking About The New Kennedy Revelations

2012-02-09T13:00:00-05:00

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's interesting that Janet Maslin's review of Mimi Alford's new memoir takes Alford to task more than it does the man at the center of the book--John F. Kennedy. I guess that makes some sense given that Alford is the author and it was ultimately her story. But I've found myself overcome by a kind of visceral revulsion as I watched the story of Alford's affair with Kennedy unfold on Rock Center last night.

The point is often made here that when we discuss illicit sexual affairs with young women and powerful men, there is a tendency to infantalize the women--to treat them as victims without any designs or sexual urges original to themselves. I think that line serves as an important corrective, and indeed in her interview Alford is fairly clear that she wanted it to happen. At the same time, I think there has to be a way to talk about a humanistic morality, without young women as sexless stand-ins for that morality.

Call me old-fashioned. But I think it's an abuse of power to begin a sexual relationship with an intern in his office, one which the willingness of the other party doesn't allow you to evade. In the coldest most removed--and frankly mildest--sense, it opens the door for complaints of favoritism. Monica Lewinsky was not the only intern in the White House. In more malicious hands it can escalate to threats and blackmail. In this particular case it opened the door, according to Alford, to the abuser requesting that she service one of Kennedy's aides, and, according to Alford, his brother.

These are the firm questions that arise. Tougher ones remain: When the head of the free world requests that a 20-year old perform oral sex on one of his aides, does consent still having meaning? Is there coercion beyond beyond the physical, even if we grant that it's beyond the realm of prosecutors?

Someone with more experience in this area can speak for me, but somehow "Well she was an adult and she consented" doesn't feel particularly feminist, or humanist, to me. I also don't buy the notion that this sort of behavior has no impact on one's politics. In this age, at the very least a penchant to give one's foes ammo is an actual problem

America's Best Literary Journalist

2012-02-09T08:21:39-05:00

The Times profiles the intrepid Katherine Boo:

Ms. Boo graduated from Barnard in the late '80s, still typing -- for The Columbia Daily Spectator, for which she wrote editorials -- and was hired by Jack Shafer, then the editor of the Washington City Paper. Mr. Shafer, now a columnist for Reuters, said recently that he was impressed less by her writing then by her voluminous reading and her ability to think on her feet, and was amazed by how accomplished her first article was. "She had the soul of a poet but the arm strength of an investigative reporter," he recalled.

What stands out for me is Boo's work, now almost 20 years ago, on the impact of welfare reform. It's always interesting to think back on how the literature of your youth shapes your path. At the time policy wonkery about the potential effects of welfare reform was all the rage. But Boo's work treated the wonkery as an excuse to write about what ultimately mattered to me as a reader--the people.

The mandate, at the time in my life, appeared simple--"Tell stories." The point here isn't that narrative is superior to stats but that narrative has a different power, and one--in our current age--which is hard to capture. Stats fit into six minute debate segment in a way that stories do not.

At any rate, I've always been impressed that Boo has taken her gifts and applied them to the impoverished corners of the world, given that there is always a lucrative market for talented writers interested, solely, in rich people.

If you're unfamiliar with her work, this piece on the aftershocks of Katrina is an excellent start. Here's a taste:

The recreation center looked out on the bayou, which most of the evacuees avoided--there were alligators there. So it was considered daring when Carolyn and Gus began taking their toddlers to the water's edge each afternoon, when the light made everything around them glimmer gold and red. "I want their eyes to be steady full of something beautiful," Carolyn said, "enough beautiful to push the ugly things they've seen out of their brains."

One afternoon, Jasmine went to the bayou, too. It was the most beautiful place she'd ever been. Like many neglected children, she'd grown used to her lot in life, and barely paid attention when her mother asked the volunteers, "You got kids? I been trying to get rid of mine for some time." Jasmine had an eleven-year-old brother, and neither of them expected their mother to do "regular stuff," like helping with homework. Their mother said, "My kids don't even ask me anymore--my nerves is bad, so they gets beat up after one problem. Other thing they know is when I put that forty dollars' worth of food on the counter every month and they eat it too fast, they be going hungry until next month comes around."

One kind of poverty is that of the imagination--the inability to envision a future truly different from the present. Jasmine had long judged people based on whether or not they gave her food and clothing, but, as she watched Carolyn and Gus and other families, she found herself mulling different gauges of worth. She'd been working lately on a definition of love. "Maybe it's that, like, you honor somebody and they honor you back," she said carefully. "If you do for them without being all, like, See, I did this for you, now you best do something for me--like, you just do it for the kind of your heart."

Jasmine had seen her father only once since she was five. She knew that he had been in prison for selling drugs and attempted murder, and that he now put siding on houses. He was six feet two, had a place in suburban Minneapolis, and had sponsored the three best days of her life: "It was February and he was in a car, and he came by his cousin's house. I was playing in the parking lot then, so I caught a look of him. I knew right away--I said, 'That my daddy,' but because I'd grown big he didn't know me. But then he did know, and he took me eating at Manhattan's in New Orleans and bowling and to a movie, then he took me by my other cousin's, then we ate doughnuts, then he brought me to Avondale, too." Jasmine's furious dialling now had direction: she would ask her father to take her in.

This is how you write when you take people seriously. Boo's new book Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity is now in your area.

Birth Control and the 'Obama Independents'

2012-02-08T11:50:00-05:00

Sarah Kliff parses the numbers on birth control, insurance, religion and the illusive independents:

And a lot of this likely isn't about Catholic voters at all. Rather, it may well be about the demographics that are most supportive of this particular health reform provision: young voters and women. In the PRRI poll, both groups register support above 60 percent for the provision.

Those two demographics are important here for a key reason: they were crucial to Obama's victory in 2008. Third Way crunched the numbers earlier this month and found that the "Obama Independents" -- the swing group that proved crucial to his 2008 victory -- are, as Ryan Lizza put it, "disproportionately young, female and secular..."

These voters have tended to be difficult for abortion rights supporters to engage on reproductive health issues like abortion. Research from NARAL Pro-Choice America, which I wrote about last weekend, found a significant "intensity gap" there, with abortion rights supporters much less likely to see it as a crucial voting issue than their anti-abortion counterparts.

But when the conversation moves away from abortion to contraceptives - as it has this week - the intensity gap flips: A much larger segment of voters are willing to penalize a legislator who votes to defund family planning. That became apparent in polling that Democratic firm Lake Research Partners did earlier this year, which found that 40 percent of voters would be less likely to support a member of Congress who votes to defund family-planning programs. Just 22 percent would be more likely to support such a lawmaker.

Two things:

1.) I think it really helps to separate Obama independents--disproportionately "young, female and secular"--from the broad nebulous "Independent voters" that we are all so fond of invoking. Everyone claims to appealing to "independents." I think that has more to do with connotations and branding (independent="thinks for self") than the actual make-up of a candidates support.

2.) The difference numbers for Catholics and White evangelicals are really interesting. It's almost as if the issue for Republicans, isn't so much a hard pitch to Catholics, as it is a hard pitch to white Evangelicals, with the hope of clipping off some conservative Catholics along the way.

Planned Parenthood's Deep Bench

2012-02-07T15:20:13-05:00

The backlash against Komen has claimed Karen Handel:

In an interview, Handel acknowledged she played a role in Komen's decision to defund Planned Parenthood, but also pushed back against allegations that she was the sole actor in the decision. "I clearly acknowledge [my role] in the process, but to suggest I had sole authority is just absurd," Handel told Fox News Tuesday afternoon.

"The policy was vetted at all appropriate levels." Handel reiterated that Komen had stopped funding Planned Parenthood because of new grantmaking policies, further explaining that "controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood" also played a role.

I don't think that Handel, or her allies, quite understood the nature of their adversaries. I mentioned this in comments the other day but it's interesting to look at how Plannned Parenthood has weathered under targeting from the Right, as compared with other groups. This is not like ACORN. Whatever their significant work in poor communities and black and Latino communities, Planned Parenthood has touched women across race and across class, and thus indirectly, touched men across race and class too.

Consider this testimony from one of the young ladies pictured below:

That's me and my best friend, three years after I was diagnosed with breast cancer. We were holding a fundraiser in 2008 for breast cancer research/awareness and celebrating another year of being cancer free. I am 27 years old and have been a breast cancer survivor for 7 years now. When I was originally diagnosed and treated, I was lucky to still be covered by my mother's insurance plan. The related medical costs were easier for us to handle.

Once I graduated college, I was no longer eligible for coverage under my mother's insurance. So when I took my first job, I readily opted into my employer's insurance plan. After submitting my application, I was told that the insurance company would not cover any tests/procedures/expenses related to my pre-existing condition...breast cancer. Not only did I require biannual mammograms, I frequently required breast ultrasounds whenever something seemed out of the ordinary with my breast exams. These procedures are extremely expensive out-of-pocket.

Additionally, I am limited as to what hormonal birth control I can take as a result of the cancer. I am limited to two types...and they are expensive. And naturally, my insurance company would not cover either of the two options that I am allowed to take. I've been in a relationship with my significant other for about six years. While we have regularly discussed the possibility of children, we are simply not ready.

Birth control is essential for our life plan. Luckily, not only was I able to turn to Planned Parenthood for my mammogram needs, they became my ONLY source for affordable birth control. Early detection is the key against any type of cancer. The resources provided by Planned Parenthood have been invaluable to me personally. It has given me peace of mind to know with 100% certainty that I have remained cancer free. You cannot put a price on peace of mind. Thank you Planned Parenthood.

The thing about Planned Parenthood is when you run against them you aren't just fighting welfare, or chastising lazy food stamp addicts. And you aren't simply bashing East Coast elites. You are making war against a free-floating nation with vassals, of all color and stripe, at the ready.

It's often said that the diffuseness of gender poses a problem for feminists activists. But here you see how that very diffuseness can be transformed from weakness into power.

The Lost Battalion

2012-02-07T12:00:00-05:00

It's yours...

The Atlantic's Civil War

2012-02-07T11:00:00-05:00

The Atlantic's stellar Civil War issue is online. As excited as I am about the issue, I'm much more excited about our own Yoni (Cynic) Applebaum's historical profile of the cyclorama at Gettysburg.

Because I'm a total downer, I most enjoyed the portion where the great illusion fell out of favor:

But even convincing illusions are eventually dispelled. "We once obtained permission to go behind the scenes in ... The Battle of Gettysburg," a critic later recalled. "After that the illusion was destroyed. Most of the cannon in the foreground were of galvanized iron, the thickness of a sheet of tin, and so were the soldiers and wagons. When we returned to the platform the skill of the deception seemed to us greater than ever, but we were thoroughly disillusioned." Familiarity turned the marvelous mundane, made the breathtaking banal.

The day of the cyclorama soon passed. In Sioux City, Iowa, a twister lifted the roof off the cyclorama building and destroyed the artwork. Another canvas was sliced into pieces, and sewn together into a tent for a restaurant. Most of the massive paintings, though, met more prosaic ends. They fell victim to leaky roofs and sagging supports, burned, or were left to decompose. By 1888, the proprietors of the Boston Cyclorama decided that Gettysburg had exhausted its appeal, and commissioned General Custer's Last Fight to replace it. More than a dozen workers labored for two weeks to remove the massive canvas; they spent at least a day just rolling it up. It toured for a few years before slipping from public view.

In 1901, the astonished Boston Globe discovered the painting in a crate on a vacant lot, topped by an improvised roof, "going to rack and ruin." The story of a painting that once cost $200,000 rotting in a box, entombed in "a sort of mausoleum of greatness," captured national attention but provoked no efforts at salvage. The Boston Cyclorama Company dissolved three years later. And there the orphaned painting sat.

Of course, the story doesn't end there.

The Only Super Bowl Ad We Care About

2012-02-07T10:00:00-05:00

The interesting thing about the Avengers is--from what I can see--this is all about watching some (mostly) dudes bash heads and melt faces. No high-minded meditations on minority rights. No existential ruminations on the unbridled rage-filled id. No Jungian treatises on the nature of fear.

It's just guns the size of Lil Bow Wow.

Gotta say, I miss the Wasp.

The Bizarre Republican Freakout Over the Clint Eastwood Superbowl Ad

2012-02-06T20:43:08-05:00

I watched the Super Bowl online and considered myself lucky, because I was -- for the most part -- spared the commercials. But the commercials are us, and the unfortunate part of opting out is that you often find yourself left out. So here I am, catching up with the flap over the Clint Eastwood commercial.

I just watched the ad seconds ago, after reading about the Republican freak-out, which I have to say is bizarre. This is the exact sort of gauzy nationalism (to paraphrase Jonathan Chait) that corporations have put out for years and Republicans have, themselves, often alluded to. This is the America of their imaginations and to see them lambasting it, evidently for name-checking Detroit and softly alluding to the bail-out, really displays a party that actually isn't.

When Republicans line up against Clint Eastwood and cars, one has to ask, "What could they possibly be for?" Child labor? Charters for blah people? Midnight Basketball?

Because It's Funny to Be Bigoted

2012-02-06T15:00:00-05:00

Fallows calls out Pete Hoekstra ridiculous ad in his campaign against Debbie Stabenow as a "embarrassment for America"

I kinda agree:

1) The "Chinese" woman speaks in American-accented English, and I would bet she is actually an Asian-American. But the script has her make pidgin grammar errors, "Me likee!!"-style.

2) The ad's words are about trade, budgets, and jobs, but its images are about -- 'Nam!! Of course some parts of southern China look the way this ad does, with rice paddies, palm trees, no big buildings, people wearing conical straw hats and bicycling along dike tops. But this is nothing like how the typical big-factory zone looks in China, or the huge cities that would exemplify Chinese wealth and the country's rise -- ie, the subjects of this ad. So why this rural setting? I think it's because it offers a kind of visual dog-whistle, for those Americans who, either through experience or through Apocalypse Now-style imagery, associate smiling-but-deceptive Asians in a rice-paddy setting with previous American sorrow.

Yeah, I've never set foot in Asia, but the whole thing scans as bigot's view of China. The acting choices -- an Asian-American (I'm guessing) performing an American bigot's idea of how all East Asians sound -- is like some sort of bizarre meta-commentary on the history of yellowface.

I hope old girl got some people with her. She fin to catch a drop-squad. Yeah. Like the eye of Sauren, we goin see you!

What? I'm saying, I ride for my (other) people...

Eddie Long Is Sorry

2012-02-06T15:00:00-05:00

The Georgia mega-preacher apologizes for having himself crowned a "king" by a fake rabbi:

"The ceremony was not my suggestion, nor was it my intent, to participate in any ritual that is offensive in any manner to the Jewish community, or any group. Furthermore, I sincerely denounce any action that depicts me as a King, for I am merely just a servant of the Lord," Long wrote in a letter dated Saturday.

The letter was addressed to Bill Nigut, southeast regional director of the Anti-Defamation League -- a Jewish group that fights anti-Semitism.

"While I believe that Rabbi Ralph Messer has good intentions during his message at New Birth, I understand that the ceremony he performed on Sunday, January 29th, caused harm to the Jewish community, for which I am deeply sorry," Long wrote.

One thing I missed in my initial reaction to this was how offensive the whole spectacle must have been for devout and believing Jews. I live in a world of agnostics and atheists. The few people I know who are religious (with the obvious exception of family) are not evangelical and have no interest in my soul. Thus the ceremony struck me, originally, as more ridiculous--in the most literal sense--than offensive. It was only after a few private conversations that I realized I was, like, sort of missing something among my guffaws.

The Lost Battalion

2012-02-06T12:19:13-05:00

It's yours...